Nirgal stood at the end of one car, looking out at the dynamited rock as it flashed past, and then as they burst back into sunlight, up at the looming wall of the Eiger overhead. A passenger walked by him on the way to the next car, then stopped and stared: “Amazing to see you here, I must say.” He had a British accent of some kind. “I just ran into your mother last week.”
Confused, Nirgal said, “My mother?”
“Yes, Hiroko Ai. Isn’t that right? She was in England, working with people at the mouth of the Thames. I saw her on my way here. Quite a coincidence running into you too, I must say. Makes me think I’ll start seeing little red men any second now.”
The man laughed at the thought, began to move on into the next car.
“Hey!” Nirgal called. “Wait!”
But the man only paused—”No no,” he said over his shoulder, “didn’t want to intrude— all I know, anyhow. You’ll have to look her up— in Sheerness perhaps—”
And then the train was squealing into the station at Klein Scheidegg, and the man hopped out an opening door in the next car, and as Nirgal went to follow him other people got in the way, and his escorts came to explain to him that he needed to descend to Grindelwald immediately if he wanted to get home that night. Nirgal couldn’t deny them. But looking out the window as they rolled out of the station, he saw the British man who had spoken to him, walking briskly down a trail into the dusky valley below.
He landed at a big airport in southern England, and was driven north and east to a town the escorts called Faversham, beyond which the roads and bridges were flooded. He had arranged to come unannounced, and his escort here was a police team that reminded him more of UNTA security units back home than of his Swiss escort: eight men and two women, silent, staring, full of themselves. When they had heard what he wanted to do, they had wanted to hunt for Hiroko by bringing people in to ask about her; Nirgal was sure that would put her in hiding, and he insisted on going out without fanfare to look for her. Eventually he convinced them.They drove in a gray dawn, down to a new seafront, right there among buildings: in some places there were lines of stacked sandbags between soggy walls, in other places just wet streets, running off under dark water that spread for as far as he could see. Some planks were thrown here and there over mud and puddles.
Then on the far side of one line of sandbags was brown water without any buildings beyond, and a number of rowboats tied to a grille covering a window half awash in dirty foam. Nirgal followed one of the escorts into one big rowboat, and greeted a wiry red-faced man, wearing a dirty cap pulled low over his forehead. A kind of water policeman, apparently. The man shook his hand limply and then they were off, rowing over opaque water, followed by three more boats containing the rest of Nirgal’s worried-looking guards. Nirgal’s oarsman said something, and Nirgal had to ask him to repeat it; it was as if the man only had half his tongue. “Is that Cockney, your dialect?”
“Cockney.” The man laughed.
Nirgal laughed too, shrugged. It was a word he remembered from a book, he didn’t know what it meant really. He had heard a thousand different kinds of English before, but this was the real thing, presumably, and he could hardly understand it. The man spoke more slowly, which didn’t help. He was describing the neighborhood they were rowing away from, pointing; the buildings were inundated nearly to their rooflines. “Brents,” he said several times, pointing with his oar tips.
They came to a floating dock, tied to what looked like a highway sign, saying “OARE.” Several larger boats were tied to the dock, or swinging from anchor ropes nearby. The water policeman rowed to one of these boats, and indicated the metal ladder welded to its rusty side. “Go on.”
Nirgal climbed the side of the boat. On the deck stood a man so short he had to reach up to shake Nirgal’s hand, which he did with a crushing grip. “So you’re a Martian,” he said, in a voice that lilted like the oarsman’s, but was somehow much easier to understand. “Welcome aboard our little research vessel. Come to hunt for the old Asian lady, I hear?”
“Yes,” Nirgal said, his pulse quickening. “She’s Japanese.”
“Hmm.” The man frowned. “I only saw her the once, but I would have said she was Asian, Bangladeshi maybe. They’re everywhere since the flood. But who can tell, eh?”
Four of Nirgal’s escorts climbed aboard, and the boat’s owner pushed a button that started an engine, then spun the wheel in the wheelhouse, and watched forward closely as the boat’s rear pushed down in the water, and they vibrated, then moved away from the drowned line of buildings. It was overcast, the clouds very low, sea and sky both a brownish gray.